Ellipsis in English: detecting invisible language

12/04/2016

The dissertation was supervised by Dr Javier Pérez Guerra, and the jury included Prof. Anne Abeillé (Paris 7), Dr Rodrigo Pérez Lorido (Oviedo) and Dr Arja Nurmi (Tampere). In this dissertation Evelyn undertook a corpus-based analysis of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis (PAE) in (Late) Modern English, using data from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (1700-1914), and compared her results with those reported for Present-Day English in the literature. A methodological pillar of this dissertation was the implementation of an algorithm which detected and retrieved examples of PAE in the parsed corpus. Chapter 1 served as a general introduction to the concept of ellipsis and to the importance of its study. Chapter 2 provided a detailed overview of the state of the art on ellipsis in grammars and dictionaries, in the most influential comprehensive grammars and theoretical frameworks. In Chapter 3, the candidate described the methodology and provided the main findings of her study.